Safety cushions for automotive vehicles are known. In the event of an impact, as detected by an accelerometer, these cushions emerge from their casing, in which they are stored in folded form, are suddenly inflated, and thus protect the passengers by interposing themselves between the passengers and any potentially hazardous structural elements of the vehicle.
The best known safety cushions, i.e. air bags, are the ones that are located in front of the front seat passengers, for example, in the steering wheel or in the dashboard. They protect the front seat passengers in the event of a frontal impact. However, safety cushions also exist whose purpose is to protect the passengers in the event of a side impact.
Specifically, these safety cushions can be encased in the vehicle seats and, yet more specifically, in the backs of the seats. In this case, a seam is provided in the seat envelope, with the strength of the seam being such that the seam can be rippled, or burst, as a result of the effect of the inflation of the cushion.
Furthermore, the seating elements of automotive vehicles are being manufactured more frequently through the use of the so-called "in situ" molding method. In this method, a filling or packing foam is injected directly into a mold whose inner wall is covered by the envelope of the seating element, which is usually a textile fabric. Thus, the element is produced immediately upon opening the mold, along with the foam that fills the envelope.
Unfortunately, it has been observed that the in situ molding method per se cannot be used to mold the safety elements that contain a safety cushion. In fact when the safety cushion inflates, an actual explosion occurs which not only causes the bursting of the seam provided for this purpose, but also ejects pieces of foam through the resulting aperture. Although these pieces of foam are light in weight, the speed is such that they can cause serious injury to the occupants of the vehicle, specifically to the eyes.